Thursday, 14 April 2016

A Different City

This was my first encounter with the
extensive works of Tanith Lee, and was a slightly contradictory experience.
There was a lot to like about the three slices of gothic horror in this slim
volume, but by many of the metrics I’d usually apply when deciding if a book’s ‘good’
or not it comes up short. Of course, this also begs the question as to how
reliable those metrics are.

Mostly it’s stuff I guess we could call ‘structural’.
These tales all revolve around the notion of retribution, of people receiving
their just desserts. Given the current fashion for moral ambiguity there’s an
almost retro quality about the black and white morality herein: bad things (eventually)
happen to bad people and everyone gets exactly what’s coming to them, be it evisceration
or transcendence. Though, on the flipside, perhaps my reading of this
simplicity is itself simplistic.

Set in the fictional French city of
Marcheval, in time periods seemingly moving slowly through the 19th
century (gas street lighting has recently been introduced in the first story,
and John Singer Sargent and Oscar Wilde are pointedly referenced in the last), A Different City shows us the lives of
three wronged women, and the steps they take, more or less voluntarily, to right
these wrongs. This volition, or not, is where my initial notions of structural
simplicity start to look a little shaky. In both the opening “Not Stopping at
Heaven” and the subsequent “Idoll” (which remains a terrible, terrible pun),
both heroines are responding to situations in which they are, as a result of
overwhelming social constrains, conspicuously powerless: at the mercy of the
men in their lives, be they husbands, brothers, or (in a perhaps not insignificant
inversion) step-fathers. And both women seek resolutions by, essentially,
abdicating responsibility; the deus ex machina of the fairy tale with a
macabre twist, wherein it isn’t your fairy godmother who’ll intervene to save
the damsel in distress, but the ravening hell-spawn, say, that emerges from
your inner self in times of great emotional stress. The black and white thus
starts to look a little greyer.

And this bring us, with pleasing aptness,
to the final and most interesting of the story of the three: “The Portrait in
Gray”. A pleasingly metatextual piece drawing not only from Wilde’s Dorian Gray but also Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X, a picture of an
anonymous society beauty which was infamous at the time for all the reasons you
can read about here. It’s also another relatively straightforward revenge story, though in this
instance it’s an artist inverting the preservative powers of Basil Hallward’s portraiture,
instead using her abilities to curse a socialite who drove her brother to
suicide. For all that it’s creepily and evocatively done, you are left
wondering at the politics of it all: if we’re willing to forgive the butchery
and apathy of the heroines in the previous two tales as understandable
reactions to the constraints of their environments, then why does the femme
fatale in this one not get extended the same allowances? It does, at least,
make you stop to ask this question, so job done, I suppose.